1. The Lost Café Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth by Meriel Schindler (W.W. Norton)

When her “maddening” father, Kurt Schindler, died in 2017, his daughter was inspired to investigate this man who had unreliable memories, continually tried to evade the law, and seemed unable to distinguish fact from fiction. In her gripping, capacious inquiry, Meriel Schindler immerses herself in family history, relentlessly unearthing evidence in Austria, Italy, Britain, and the U.S., and tracing illustrious alleged relatives including Oskar Schindler, Franz Kafka, and the wife of Gustav Mahler. She separates fact from fiction through the generations, from imperial grandeur through the Third Reich. Schindler illuminates life in the evolving Austro-Hungarian Empire and spotlights the heart of social life in Innsbruck, the grand Café Schindler, and she ambitiously explores how the Holocaust has reverberated through generations.

2. King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King by Daniel de Visé (Atlantic Monthly)

King lived a big life, and de Visé captures it vividly in his fine biography that spans the full arc from King’s birth in Mississippi’s Delta to his height as a powerful, influential blues musician and his final days suffering from complications of diabetes. De Visé goes beyond King’s Grammys to his childhood discovery of the guitar and its magic, as well as his deeply held anger over the racial harassment and discrimination he endured. De Visé brings sophistication to his depiction of the music business, arguing how King was influenced by pioneer T-Bone Walker and went on to inspire a new generation of artists like Eric Clapton. Casting King’s story as part of the Great Migration, de Visé has written a powerful work of social history entwined with the story of how his unique blues style achieved international fame.

3. Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World by Wil Haygood (Knopf)

Haygood’s ambitious story of America interwoven with the history of filmmaking and racial dynamics is richly rewarding, and certainly more than an encyclopedic account of breakthrough performances of actors such as Sidney Poitier snubbed by the Oscars until he was rewarded for Lilies of the Field in 1964, with the Civil Rights Act following just months later. Haygood draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including interviews with actors and screenwriters and newspaper – black and white – archives, as well as the film. He keys into national politics and history, ranging from the often-overlooked Homestead Act of 1862 to more recent tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Haygood, author of The Butler: A Witness to History, which Lee Daniels made into a film, is a gifted writer who ingeniously propels this narrative with artful “Flashback” and “Interlude” chapters.

 4.  Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross (Metropolitan)

Ross, prominent professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, returns to central Florida, the terrain of his groundbreaking The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. With his unique blend of ethnography and investigative journalism, Ross focuses on Osceola County, with its extraordinary lack of affordable low-income housing. The corridor south of Disney World represents the growing inequality following the 2008 mortgage crisis which has divided the affluent owners of second homes and Disney service workers laid off because of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the jobless and homeless who find shelter in seedy motels and encampments in the Sunshine State.

5. Fight Night by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury)

As in her 2019 Women Talking, featuring a small chorus of women in a fundamentalist Mennonite community, from teenagers to grandmothers, Toews again focuses on multigenerational female relationships, though this time through three generations of a Toronto family. This beguiling novel is narrated by the youngest of the trio, the 9-year-old, irrepressible but worried and precocious Swiv. It takes the form of a long letter to her absent father, which Swiv is writing while being home-schooled by her sickly grandmother, after being suspended for fighting, and her pregnant actress mother is out working. While her mother is angry, her grandmother possesses an infectious exuberance that carries this wonderful tragi-comic work of fiction.

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